Ingrid is home for a whole ten days. It’s not a week of leave but a week of theoretical studies at home – a 500-page dense brick of a book about “Soldiership in the field” (which you can actually get as a free PDF online), a thinner one about anti-tank grenade launchers, another about working as a security guard at restricted-access sites.

It’s not a week of leave, but at least she can get home-cooked food and pet a cat while studying.

A single dose of analgesic was enough to make a visible difference in Nysse. Two more daily doses and he’s back to normal. Eating three full portions of food and asking for more in between; going out for hours; looking relaxed while he sleeps. While he was in pain, it looked like he could never quite relax: even when he was resting, he didn’t dissolve into a puddle of cat. That turned-up chin and upside-down head is the clearest sign of deep relaxation.

Nysse still seems unwell. No appetite, no energy. With the wound on his ear looking all healed, something else must be going on. The online vet service guided me through inspecting all of Nysse’s body for invisible damage, and we found out that his tail is somehow hurt. Today I got an emergency appointment at a local vet clinic. They confirmed damage to the tail, but couldn’t see through his thick fur if there was an actual wound or not.

Off with the fur, then! Luckily there was no wound hiding under the fur, so maybe there’s “just” some internal damage. (Nothing too serious, because he is using and moving his tail quite normally.) Might be this isn’t even related to the fight he had, just coincidental timing. Anyway, he came home with a naked tail and a prescription for painkillers. Hopefully that will get him on track to heal.

The vet was going to tidy up the haircut, but Nysse wouldn’t have any more of that, so this is what he gets to live with.

The fight that Nysse had last week left him with a jagged wound in his right ear. Those ears are like a record of his battles. The tips of both are a bit ragged, one is split at the end, but this is the largest wound yet. I’ve been a bit worried – he hasn’t quite had the same appetite and energy as he usually does. The wound doesn’t look infected, and he doesn’t have a fever, and he is still eating and going out, so hopefully he just feels a bit off. My pet insurance company offers free online consultations with a vet, and they confirmed that all seems OK, so I guess I’ll just keep him under close observation.

I wish he could just stop fighting – but if the neighbours’ cat is trying to claim that our yard is now part of his territory, I can understand that Nysse won’t accept that.

Nysse has a deep-seated rivalry with one of the neighbour cats. I think there is severe disagreement about territory. The other cat, who moved here relatively recently, seems to think that our garden is part of his territory, while Nysse of course does not agree.

They stand face to face and yowl at each other. Sometimes they swipe at each other; that’s when I think Nysse comes home with loose tufts of fur.

This morning they had a stand-off in the other cat’s yard, just across the street, loudly enough that I heard it through closed doors and windows while I was sitting at my work desk. I poked my head out to see what was going on, and saw the man in the house do the same through his front door.

Things must have escalated. Fifteen minutes later, Nysse came in, dripping blood on the floor from a ragged wound in one of his ears, and a dozen tufts of fur sticking out all over his torso. I had to wash it out in the bathroom, which didn’t make him any happier.

On the one hand I hope he won over the other cat, so that maybe he can have more peace in our yard without someone else muscling in. On the other hand, of course, I don’t want any cat to be hurt. I do wish they could just ignore each other. But if some stranger suddenly started hanging out in my garden and saying “it’s theirs now”, I wouldn’t give up without a fight either.

Here’s a photo of an earlier stand-off, from a couple of weeks ago, before the snow came.

Boatloads of snow.

Nysse doesn’t have a litterbox (I decommissioned the one we had when he hadn’t touched it in months) and does his business outside. In this weather, he walked a few metres away from the stairs, dug a little hole in the snow, covered it up with more snow, and came straight back inside.

It’s not particularly cold, even. Just very, very snowy.

For a couple of weeks, Nysse was particularly hungry, almost obsessed with food. Normally he gets his three servings of dry food, and cheap cat-quality canned tuna whenever he asks for it. Now he’s been trying to steal ingredients while I cook, and even try and sneak food from my plate on the kitchen table when I look away. I don’t know what it was, but I’m glad it looks like we’re leaving that period behind us.

We do generally have an agreement about what parts of the kitchen we share and which parts are off-limits for him. The sink, and anything to the left of it, is no man’s land. Anything in the sink is free for him to taste, or eat. (I make sure to keep the sink cat-safe whenever he’s nearby, and we all know not to re-use any bowl or utensil that’s been in the sink.)

To the right of the sink is the humans’ domain, no cats allowed. Having access to a small part of the kitchen counter and occasionally getting a taste of what’s there seems to satisfy his curiosity and cravings – he doesn’t normally try to encroach upon the parts that I’ve decided are not for him.

He has odd favourites. Like, everyone knows that cats love dairy: he licks tubs of quark and crème frâiche so clean that they almost sparkle. But Nysse also loves canned tomatoes and tomato sauces; grainy/mealy things like oatmeal porridge and bread dough; and – most surprisingly for me – the liquid around canned beans and chickpeas.

Nysse doesn’t need or like brushing; he keeps himself very clean on his own. He sheds what seems to me like a normal amount (a pet hair remover for the living room carpet is a must!) but sometimes he also loses entire tiny tufts of hair. Small clumps of hairs come loose, but also not entirely – they stick out a few millimetres from the rest of his fur and mar the sleek look of it. They stand out in a way that I can’t ignore. A very gentle tug loosens them fully, and he looks all smooth and pretty again. At those time I feel some kind of kinship with all those chimpanzees who are so often pictured grooming each other.

Nysse has been rather cuddly recently, often sleeping in my lap for long stretches of time. I feel cruel when I force him to move and do my best to avoid that. Make sure to have a knitting project, phone and computer within reach before settling in. Have a cushion or two at hand to prop up the computer, for slightly improved ergonomics. Which is still crap when I’m sitting like this, with the computer off to one side, so I tend to do more knitting and less reading and writing when I have Nysse asleep on me. With the knitting, it’s best to work on either something really small that I can hold above him, or something quite large that I can rest on him like a blanket. Mid-size work that only hangs loosely above him is not great because it tickles him.